Stephanie Ball-Mitchell is the founder and lead trainer of Online Yoga School.
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For me, the decision to turn my local yoga business into a successful international business was not one I made consciously. Rather, the evolution from a small local studio to hundreds of online students worldwide took me by surprise—a wonderful surprise, to be sure, but one that came with a number of growing pains.
There is something special about teaching people yoga face-to-face. I wanted to share this feeling on a more global scale, to enable more people to experience the power of yoga. So, in 2015, I opened up my online yoga teacher training course to students everywhere and was blown away by the level of interest the online training course received.
Quickly, I had to adapt to the demands of running a global business—a steep learning curve—while not losing sight of my core mission: to offer yoga in a format that is affordable, accessible and authentic. Here are some of the lessons I learned that may be helpful to other entrepreneurs whose businesses are in similar transition:
Be Prepared For Growth
For me, the biggest obstacle was that I just wasn’t prepared for the rate at which the business would grow. In the beginning, I was a one-woman shop. I did everything: I answered calls, checked emails, did advertising, built the website, filmed the videos, designed and issued the certificates of completion. That would have been fine if I had wanted to stay small. But I wanted to reach a global audience—and when my business started to grow, suddenly there just wasn’t enough time in the day to complete the many supporting tasks associated with running a program on that scale.
This all came to a head when the pandemic hit, and more and more people who were stuck at home decided they wanted to become yoga teachers. At that point, it took me hours just to manage email. Having a clear, systematic, and organized workflow for these business processes suddenly became vital—and it was something I had to put together on the fly, which in hindsight I see I needed to already have in place when I started to reach a global audience.
Hand Over The Reins
Because I didn’t have an organized way of dealing with these business processes, I couldn’t easily just hand the reins over to someone else. I also had no experience hiring people. As a stop-gap, I ended up pulling my family members in to help with various tasks: My mom helped me issue certificates; my daughters helped with some business management tasks and billing issues; my husband was answering the phone. My oldest daughter continues to be my operations manager to this day. But, in this respect, I was very fortunate; not everyone has a big family that is able to pitch in flexibly and cover all the bases during periods of sudden growth.
Ultimately, I had to do the work to identify each individual task, locate and hire qualified professionals, and shift those tasks on to them. Being mindful of what these tasks were, and finding the right dedicated individuals to handle at least some of them from the get-go—such as accounting, advertising, graphic design—would have saved me (and my family) a lot of stress when business really started to skyrocket.
Keep Eyes Off The Competition
I consider other yoga teachers my colleagues. But when colleagues become adversarial and start to employ shady business practices, they position themselves more as competitors. I noticed that another yoga teacher who recently launched an online yoga teacher training program copied my mission statement and added it into her own logo design. This was troubling because my mission statement came from my heart and my personal lived experience. She also began utilizing the exact same course packages I did, with the same bonus course offerings that I’d been offering for years. And, when I went to look at her website, I found that her copy mimicked mine almost verbatim. Initially, I found this both frustrating and worrisome: What would I do if this person used my own business model and my own personal mission to siphon away potential students who were searching for my school?
Eventually, I took a step back and realized that this practitioner could never run the same business I did, because quite simply, she wasn’t me. In creating these online courses, where the instructor’s personality and interactions with students are very important to the overall experience, it would not be possible for another instructor to deliver the same experience that I could. With that in mind, I retrained my focus on teaching with authenticity and providing great courses for the yoga teacher trainees. The way to handle competition is to avoid getting caught up in it; instead, devote your energy to making sure you are delivering your best possible product to customers.
Focus On Purpose And Authenticity
Ultimately, if you’re starting a business based on your passion, then that passion should remain at the center of what you do. Obviously, things like revenue and profit margin are important—but the key is to find good people to work on those things for you, freeing you up for the most part to focus on whatever it is that you can uniquely offer. It can be tempting to constantly check your phone to see how many people have enrolled today, or how many followers you have on social media, or how much money is going into the account—but all of that is a distraction that undermines the true purpose of your work.
Instead, keep your heart in the right place: Create the best possible product, and then deliver it with honesty and openness. In crowded industries, customers want to deal with someone authentic, whom they can trust—that in itself will keep them coming in, and coming back.
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Steph Ball-Mitchell